Tech —

Running Windows 7 under OS X: Ars reviews VMware Fusion 3

VMware has released the latest version of the popular Mac virtualization …

VMware Fusion 3 was released last week into the anxiously trembling hands of desktop virtualization junkies, and we've run the release through a gamut of heavy tests to see if it's able to meet the hype.

At first glance, 3.0 doesn't look to be teeming with new features, but the changes that are there are significant:

That's quite a beefy set of coding accomplishments. Let's see if they were pulled off without any casualties.

Test Hardware

Mac Pro 2009 Xeon 5500 dual quad 2.66 GHz

24GB RAM

Mac OS X 10.6.1 (64-bit kernel)

MacBook Pro Santa Rosa 2.4GHz

4GB RAM

Mac OS X 10.6.1 (32-bit kernel)

System Requirements

Any Mac with an Intel processor

1GB of RAM, 2GB recommended

700MB of free disk space for VMware Fusion, and at least 5GB of free disk space for each virtual machine

Mac OS X version 10.5.8 or later; Mac OS X version 10.6 Snow Leopard or later

Pricing

New license: $79.99

Upgrade from 1.0/2.0: $39.99

Installation and VM upgrading

For users wondering whether 2.0 VMs will work in 3.0, the answer is yes, with no exceptions. The VM update process is very straightforward: update the application and update your VMware Tools inside your existing VM, reboot your VM, and you're done. In my experience, there were no problems upgrading 2.0 VMs, but I did have a problem with my Vista 64-bit Boot Camp partition:

I hadn't used the Boot Camp VMware install for a very long time, so this error could have been caused by any number of things. I think I had installed a new version of Windows on the VM, so it was completely out of sync with the VMware files. It was easily fixed by deleting all the VMware files from that folder referenced in the error, reimporting Boot Camp into VMware, and reinstalling the VMware Tools. Save for that hiccup, upgrading my rather large library of test VMs was pretty painless.

Interface and Integration Enhancements

The VMware interface was always very functional with decent integration, but version 3 makes some welcome tweaks. The menus have been rearranged and the hub of interacting with VMs, the Virtual Machine Library, got an overhaul to make it more welcoming:

The Home portion of the VM Library window is a list of application assistants for various starting point tasks.

Those are all pretty unremarkable except for the new switcher-friendly ability to convert a Windows PC to a VM. While the "Connect your PC to your Mac with a simple Ethernet cable" migration tool is cool, if you install Apple's Bonjour for Windows, you can automatically discover your PC on the network and do the import that way. I couldn't try a real "PC" conversion since I only have an old dusty Athlon with no hard drive and I don't have any IDE disks around to toss into the dinosaur. So I faked it and booted up my MacBook Pro into Boot Camped Windows XP 32-bit, installed the Bonjour Tools and the VMware Migration Assistant (thank you for not calling it a Wizard), and started the Bonjour-based migration:

I waited for a while for the Assistant to find my Windows MacBook Pro but with no luck. I restarted the MacBook Pro and when the Windows Assistant loaded on boot, I tried again and it managed to find the machine and prompted me to save the VM file:

The Space Needed value is way off—my Windows Boot Camp partition is actually 20GB and it only uses 11 of that. Nevertheless, my imported VM file was 304GB:

So it seems that the assistant just reports the C: drive's disk size, not the actual contents, unless this is a problem with the Apple GUID partition table interpretation. Worse, the VM refused to boot. I hesitate to be critical of this since it's likely tripping on the Boot Camp partitioning scheme, which wouldn't be a factor for someone wanting to migrate from a genuine Windows PC. I wish I could say for certain whether this was the case, but all my neighbors have Macs as well (in the Plateau Montreal, you're either a graphic designer or a photographer), so I can't test this feature the way it's meant to be tested.